Letters

Visionary, not elitist Theodore Dalrymple's diatribe against Virginia Woolf (Essay, August 17) seems designed to instigate an angry reaction from the Woolf-worshipping masses, but his views are mainly recycled, and say nothing that wasn't said (and with more relevance) when the book came out more than 60 years ago, and later in Quentin Bell's biography of his aunt. Woolf's feminist and pacifist tract is no doubt far from perfect, but it was written with insight, vision, and forethought - some qualities that Dalrymple's prose sorely lacks.

It was interesting to read that these complaints about Woolf's elitism (another worn-out theme) were written with Michel Leiris's first edition of Three Guineas in hand: my own copy was a second-hand umpteenth-edition paperback with no such credentials, and highlighted throughout in yellow marker, probably by some other "shallow... snobbish, trivial, philistine" reader. Jeff Geiger Colchester

Pacifism was popular I'm glad Theodore Dalrymple thinks a lot of his mum, and her courage during the second world war (August 17). But it is erroneous to define the pacifist activism of the post-"Great" war decades of the 20s and 30s as some indulgent folly of the educated classes. Dalrymple is required to oversimplify in order to justify painting Woolf as one of an eccentric and privileged few, when in fact non-intervention, peace, and appeasement were the overwhelming national and international policies of the late 1930s, precisely because they were popularly supported. After the first world war, no sane person in Europe wanted another one - "never again" being the simple slogan of the era.

It is no great surprise that the opinions of Woolf and the Bloomsbury group carried some weight in their day by virtue of their celebrity and status. Another narcissistic, privileged contemporary of theirs, Winston Churchill, was similarly indulged. Perhaps we can all reflect - through the telescope of history - on the undemocratic influences that status, wealth and heredity wield. Mac Dunlop Bristol

Crying Woolf Here is Virginia Woolf in A Room of One's Own: "That persistent voice, now grumbling, now patronising, now domineering, now grieved, now shocked, now angry, now avuncular, that persistent voice which cannot let women alone, but must be at them, like some too-conscious governess..."

Sound familiar? I advise all women who read Theodore Dalrymple's attack on Woolf last week to go back to their own rooms and stay there. Sheena Joughin London

A false Eco The encyclopaedic comprehension of occultism and "conspiranoia" shown by Umberto Eco in Foucault's Pendulum deserts him slightly when writing about the century-old Protocols of the Elders of Zion (Commentary, August 17).

These pretended lectures on "secret" plans for world domination were exposed in the 1920s as an amalgam of previously published material, but their actual compilers remain unknown. The document survives because people read into it "uncannily" plausible predictions of historical events, from the establishment of the 1917 Soviet republic to the 1929-31 economic crisis. It does not, as Eco alleges, propose to "dupe the working class" by "sport and visual communication", but it does specify the corruption of future generations by alcohol, pornography, lotteries, demotic entertainments and contagious diseases.

Its symbolic significance intrigued Evola because he regarded Jews as paradigm-shifters and tradition-disrupters, deprecating a phenomenon - manifested by Marx, Freud et al - appraised more positively nowadays. In his Protocols introduction and Tre aspetti del problema ebraico (1937), Evola clearly distinguishes his defensive cultural critique from the pseudo- biological criminalisation of Jewry as a whole. For this anti-racism he was officially denounced in Landra's La difesa della razza [The Defence of the Race]. Natalia Myers Goslar, Germany

Salute to Sussex It was with great joy that I chanced upon Hilaire Belloc in Review (Beer and Sussex, August 17). His poems present a homely view of Sussex and England not seen since the end of the second world war, and are a genuine treat for anyone wishing to learn more about early 20th-century poetry.

It is a shame that many of today's poets are of the opinion that the last century's poetry began with TS Eliot, to the degree that they are wholly ignorant of poets such as Belloc, John Masefield, Francis Thompson, WH Davies, and Edward Thomas. Where would we be without the immortal lines:

The great hills of the South Country They stand along the sea, And it's there, walking in the high woods, That I could wish to be, And the men that were boys when I was a boy Walking along with me.